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Big Apple Jazz Blog

Bills Place

COVID Current List of Open Manhattan Jazz Clubs – OCT. 2021

The light at the end of the tunnel report – We are finding it difficult to pull together jazz tours that can get to three clubs a night within 4-5-hours as we did prior to March 2020.  In March 2021 we were able to start touring again – taking guests to live jazz performances in only one club per night, which was a blessing, hearing some of the most joyous nights of music we ever witnessed.   Nowadays, we are happy to report that hearing live jazz in two clubs per night is becoming typical on certain nights of the week.  Importantly, some regularly scheduled outdoor jazz events have been produced by local heroes throughout the pre-vaccine pandemic to great effect – bringing all-star players into intimate settings with little or no fanfare.  These events helped sustain the scene through…

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October 7, 2021

Bill Saxton – Harlem’s Saxa Claus – Streaming Holiday Cheer

I met Bill Saxton at St. Nick’s Pub one Friday night in 1997 during one of his weekly gigs.  Over the years we have remained friendly, our lives intersecting significantly in the early 2000’s when we each opened a Harlem jazz spot within a few blocks of the other.   Bill’s Place, 148 West 133rd…

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December 23, 2020

Loving Tribute to the Harlem Underground Jazz Scene

We wanted to share this video of photos and clips from our time on the Harlem jazz scene.  It covers the underground clubs and magnificent players we’ve been enjoying during our over 20 years in business. Some close friends: Gary Samuels, Alex Layne, Linda Carr, Samuel Hargress Jr.,  were lost at the start of the…

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October 9, 2020

Resurrection of our old NYC Jazz Club Bible

Some of our long-time visitors -we’ve been around since the turn of the century- have been missing our big list of NYC jazz clubs, and the content we used to include about each club. As it turns out this information was lingering somewhere in the dark web ready to be resurrected – so here it…

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December 2, 2019

The Harlem Jazz Scene – a retrospective on the day after St. Nick’s Pub fire

We woke up to the devastating news of a deadly fire last night in Harlem on the set of a Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Leslie Mann movie called Motherless Brooklyn.  With that kind of star power glaring their vision, what reporters so far have overlooked is that the charred set of this movie was in the defunct and deserted St. Nick’s Pub which closed 7 years earlier this same month. As Harlem jazz fans wake up to this news through word-of-mouth, I wanted to resurrect an article I wrote nearly 10 years ago, describing the uptown jazz scene when it was truly in it’s 21st century heyday – when St. Nick’s Pub and the Lenox Lounge were still swinging and Earl Spain was still the proprietor of the Uptown Lounge at Minton’s Playhouse.  St. Nick’s Pub…

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March 23, 2018

Cheap NYC Jazz Clubs

New York City: Affordable Live Jazz Clubs In Manhattan (Where you can hear the greats from Greenwich Village to Harlem) By Gordon Polatnick I started Big Apple Jazz Tours with the understanding that jazz is at its best when musicians and audiences are sharing an intimate, interactive experience that feels like it could go on forever, and that something unexpected is bound to happen.  There are wonderful, famous Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard, Birdland, Blue Note, Dizzy’s, Iridium, Jazz Standard, and Smoke, which regularly present legendary performers in intimate settings but must clear the house between sets – stifling the spontaneity to some extent.  These are great venues but they don’t tell the whole story.  Jazz fans in New York have become used to plenty of options that you may not be aware of yet. New York has been home to the majority of legendary jazz…

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June 22, 2017